My Wife didn't understand my Facebook post--which was just the picture below:
What does the FBI think they can prove here? Are they not sure they have enough evidence that the guy was trespassing in the Capitol and the Lego set will put them over the top?
Maybe the FBI has watched one too many 'heist' movies and they think his sinister plot depended on the detailed model, provided by Lego.
With flat light, you can still kind of see the break line, it runs almost vertically.
BTW. These pills are our elderly female dog's incontinence drug--estrogen. They work like magic. She gets half a pill per day, wrapped in American Cheese, so she will eat it.
David writes:
If you look at past and current infection rates in the UK, it looks pretty scary:
That the Italian flag has vertical stripes. It's not shocking, it's just that it never really occurred to me that there is a flag, almost just like it, but horizontal.
The reason for this was that I had been watching a bunch of Wimbledon over a very rainy 3-day weekend and marveled at how no American men were left and yet Canada and Italy each had two men left.
Well, I was right about Canada, but not Italy. I thought that a name like Márton Fucsovics didn't sound very Italian, but reasoned that professional tennis players are kind-of world citizens: They choose a place that is nice to live in and which has the kind of weather which allows you to train year-round. Italy has pretty nice weather compared to most of the Slavic areas. Anyway, I noticed his flag was different from the very typically named Italian, Matteo Berrettini's flag.
So I learned something about the Italian flag and something about the Hungarian flag too.
But we still got to do everything we wanted to do:
On the 4th, I got in a run during a break in the rain--I would have happily run in the rain, but it was nice to see the sun.
Later, I fired up the grill when it was mostly sunny. When it started to rain, I wheeled the grill to a place under the new shelter we just installed and I was able to grill, without the rain drowning the coals or wetting the meat.
After dinner, it got nice again and everyone went outside and lounged under the shelter. I had wheeled the grill back to its normal place in the sun, or rain.
Much later, some fireworks were set-off and I was kind of glad it was raining again, since one of the small rockets landed in an oak tree branch and a small fire was burning up there. I'm pretty sure the tree was never in danger and all that was burning was the firework itself. But better safe than sorry: The garden hose just reached the spot (after I stood up on the deck railing) and after a few tense moments, all was well. We set off one more large rocket and decided to not test our luck with the arrays of tiny ones.
Another break in the rain came on the 5th and so my wife and I explored a new (to us) trail nearby. It was very buggy and the trail didn't go far. But the town forrest had been harvested in 2019--according to a sign I saw on the way to the parking spot--so there was much open area and we found ripe blueberries growing in there. We braved the deer flies and mosquitoes long enough to enjoy a couple handfuls of the tiny but very sweet and tasty berries, before making our escape.
It was Saturday the 3rd of July and we had plans. I was watching Wimbledon tennis and my wife had plans to either do a cardio class, or treadmill if the class was cancelled.
Either of these plans require electricity, which just went-off around 8:00 AM. I've done it so often, it was almost too easy: Open the garage door manually, wheel out the generator and plug it into the outside 220V socket, fire the unit up, go to the basement and shut-off the main breaker and all the other breakers, energize the socket breaker then all the others one-by-one. Go back out and release the choke on the generator.
I got Wimbledon back on the TV once the cable box reset itself and the wife's class remained cancelled so we decided to find out if the generator could handle the treadmill. It could!
We were back on track!
Matt Damon Is a lucky guy. He’s aged to the perfect spot—as old as Wilford Brimley was in Cocoon, but doesn’t look old like that. Damon was a handsome young man, but had an uncanny resemblance to Hillary Swank. Life is good for both of them, Hillary Swank is still beautiful and Damon is a little less pretty, but in a good way.
I feel a little bad, with everyone picking on Brimley for looking unusually old for his age—he still made it to 85, which is pretty respectable. So I feel like I should point out, in The Natural, Richard Farnsworth was two years younger than Brimley but looks 10 years older:
The Natural
I think a lot of men looked old at an early age back then—of course it could have been Hollywood movie magic. Robert Redford was the same age as Farnsworth in that scene (47), so not everybody looked old for their age back then.
The units are not the same: nM/L in the olympic standard and the normal medical standard is ng/dL. Getting from L to dL is easy, just divide by 10. So 10 nM/L = 1 nM/dL but we have to get to ng/dL.
Testosterone weighs 288.42 g/M so: (1 nM/dL)(288.42g/M) = 288.42 ng/dL
That's around the low end for a man.
"In women, normal testosterone levels range from 15 to 70 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL) of blood."
So the IOC is allowing trans-women a level over 4 times the high end of normal for women?
It was off-topic, but waste not, want not:
I think some people want to make Juneteenth problematic.
I was in a Twitter “debate” a few days ago and the poster was claiming that teaching about Juneteenth was illegal due to anti CRT laws being passed in various states. The line of “reasoning” was as follows:
Opening salvo by none other than former Sec of Labor Robert Reich:
“So let me get this straight: Juneteenth is now a federal holiday, but laws are being enacted all across the country to keep people from learning about it?”
Pushback from Zaid Jilani:
“No, that’s not at all what’s happening, but what’s the point of correcting you? It’s not a genuine question.”
Defense of Reich from Xavier Harmony:
What kind of white person can learn about Juneteenth without feeling discomfort?
“A bill signed into law by Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt bans lessons that include the concept that someone should feel discomfort, guilt or distress on account of their race.”
Where I come in:
“The point of Juneteenth was that people were freed, not that it was fine to own them.”
To elaborate a bit: I became aware of Juneteenth about 20 year’s ago. I believe it was from an article in someplace like The Atlantic or The New Yorker about Ralph Ellison's novel, Juneteenth. I haven’t read it, but the review gave some background of the Juneteenth episode in history.
From an intellectual point of view, it was somewhat predictable: No rational person would think that all the slaves were freed the day after Appomattox, news traveled slowly and it was a large country. In fact, I suppose there were some people still enslaved even after Juneteenth—some out-of-the-way place, that didn’t get the news, or just ignored it until somebody came and forced them to comply.
Anyway, what I felt about Juneteenth and in fact, whenever I hear about slaves being freed, wars ending, etc. is happiness. Not guilt. Why would I feel guilt for things that happened long before I was born? And really, who but a racist, thinks I ought to feel guilt for something out of my control, like the color of my skin or the circumstances of my birth?
If for some reason, a bunch of nuts decided to sneak Flat Earth theories into public school science classes, we ought to do something about it. This does not involve banning the idea, people can still freely discuss it, should they wish to do so. We just wouldn't give it legitimacy by presenting it along side the spherical Earth theory.
I suppose the flat-earthers might try a couple of tactics:
--Why are anti-flat-earthers afraid of presenting this theory along side other theories?
--They would just lie and claim that Flat-Earth science isn't being taught, but also that it is totally correct and aught to be taught.
--They would claim that this is just geology and it is accepted by high-level academic researchers.
David writes:
I grew-up in Spokane and had heard that bordellos were operated in Wallace. I had no first-hand verification of these rumors until some years later. A friend had a bachelor party in State Line ID. Next to the bar was a cat house. The proprietress made it clear what they were doing there, without directly saying it. This made me conclude that it may not be legal, but is tolerated. A few years later I was in a situation where I needed to drive between Sun Valley ID and Spokane every month, always late at night/very early morning. I mainly used a route which took me right past (really over, since it was an elevated part of the freeway) Wallace on I-90. The architecture looked interesting, but I never stopped; I had a 500 mile trip, which was either just starting or nearly over. Plus I would be going past between midnight and 5 AM.
I did end up going there once. I picked-up a hitchhiker on one of the trips. Yes, back in my 20’s I was pretty care-free and thought the chances of being murdered were remote. I soon found out I had picked up a prostitute who needed a ride into Wallace, for work. I don’t remember how she told me, but I remember it was pretty matter-of-fact. Me: This is certainly an odd hour to need to be anywhere. Her: I work at the bordello, my car wouldn’t start and this is a good time of the night for this line of work. Me: Glad I could help. She was dressed provocatively, so I assumed she wasn’t some sort of support staff. In fact, she may have just come out and told me she was a hooker, but it’s been over 30 years and memory fades.
Down in the city, it looked like an interesting place and I wanted to go back and visit in the day time. But the thing is that it was kind of a hike from Spokane (about 90 miles), so I never did. Also, I now live near Boston, which may not be the center of the universe, but is claimed to be the hub of the universe. So, I’ve always kept some kind of central point not too far away.
If you're good at IUPAC naming conventions, it is possible to easily identify the difference between these similar molecules. But if it's been a while since you've done organic chemistry, this will work--if you have acrobatic eyes.
We had a listening session at work yesterday regarding verdict from the Chauvin trial.
Lots of tears, lots of quivering voices. I was a little baffled, I mean, I know there are various perspectives on the issue, but didn't realize the emotional investment that some people carry.
Maybe part of the reason is that reality is a long way from perception:
" Eight in 10 African-American survey respondents believe that young black men are more likely to be shot to death by the police than to die in a traffic accident; one in 10 disagrees. Among a highly educated sample of liberal whites, more than six in 10 agreed. In reality, considerably more young African-American men die in car accidents than are shot to death by police."
https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/social-construction-racism-united-states-EK.pdf
The responses can be: How are so many people so misinformed? OR It's BS! There's no way traffic accidents kill more black men than are killed by police!
Well it isn't even close: Traffic deaths of black men are over 3,000 per year and police (fatal) shootings of black men are around 200 per year. So, this is like a 15-fold difference. And also, BTW. Twice as many white men are shot to death by police every year than the number of black men. Yes, there are more white men than there are black men, but then black men commit about as many violent crimes as white men, so the number of police/suspect interactions should be about the same.
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